“The New SDS” by Christopher Phelps [April 16] articulates something a lot of young people are feeling more and more: the bubbling of a new student activism that’s just beginning to define our generation. As a national student organizer for SDS and Rainforest Action Network, I see it daily across the country. Social movements come in waves and cycles; the pendulum is swinging back in our direction right now. The student movement has, of course, not yet reached the proportions of the 1930s or ’60s, but the depth and sophistication of student organizing is growing and evolving by leaps and bounds. The new student activism is grounded in a vision of participatory democracy, student power and liberation. It seeks to be relevant, thoughtful and strategic, by taking intergenerational organizing and mentorship seriously, without nostalgia for the past. Despite the complexities of taking on the name SDS–both the opportunities and the baggage–we are a new organization for a new generation. SDS is growing because students are hungry. We are growing because we are providing an entry point into the movement that so many students are looking for.
Christopher Phelps has written a timely but ultimately disappointing article about the vibrant and growing student movement. He transforms the tough challenges of movement-building into a set of tepid formulas about what not to do. The new wave of student activism in America and around the world is a hopeful development worthy of our active participation and respect. Yet Phelps focuses on the sectarian divides of the Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS) generation, rehearsing old political grudges or offering simplistic “lessons” from the New Left rather than highlighting the steps forward and the common ground among radical organizers. Our points of convergence (young and old, organizers and activists) are numerous, including the need to strive for participatory democracy and nonexclusion, to resist the savage wars and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, fight brutal poverty and gluttonous wealth here and globally, act to end catastrophic climate change, racial injustice and patriarchal power and reject the permanent “war on terror” in toto. Phelps would have benefited from more attention to what led to coordinated antiwar actions on sixty campuses in March, and to the new, diverse SDS campaigns, ranging from getting military recruiters out of high schools and off campuses to antisweatshop coordination, from opposition to police violence against the community to protest when war criminals speak, from support for Assata Shakur and the new Panther 8 defendants to fights for universal healthcare–radical youth organizing is broad and deep. This is the power and the inspiration of a vast left umbrella network with variety and vigor.